First, make sure you are a horse. Faster mammals, such as cheetahs, may well find themselves disqualified on genetic grounds, while humans will have to resort to a machine - perhaps a Porsche 911, to stand any chance. Actually, despite the potentially misleading title, this is a book about how to win at gambling on horse races, which is at least something in which humans will have the edge over horses. If you have always wondered what the difference was between tote betting and pari-mutuel, and how to assess the condition of the ground in relation to equine chances, then Levez, a former betting-shop manager, is your woman; she also gives kindly advice on how not to lose your shirt (don't take a cashcard with you), a primer on the calculation of probabilities, and even, for the arithmetically challenged, a table of common wins according to odds and stake. SP

Art Theory: A Very Short Introductionby Cynthia Freeland (Oxford, £6.99)

Art: what is it good for? What does it mean? What is it? Such questions have worried many fine minds - even those of some artists - for a few thousand years, and Freeland's is a snappy attempt at a tour d'horizon of the answers. Beginning with the work of moderns who use "blood, urine, maggots and plastic surgery", Freeland zooms through Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Kant, Dante, Benjamin et al, and examples of art that range from Greek tragedy to Zen gardens and Hirst's pickled shark. She finishes with some speculations about the future of what is horribly termed "cyber-art". Comments about particular artworks range from banal to mysterious - Euripedes's Medea is an "emotional roller coaster", while, in an interesting choice of adjective, it is said that Wagner's music "poses hideous challenges to singers" - but the whole may make a useful crib for some future Matthew Collings. SP

Gehennical Fire: The Lives of George Starkeyby William R Newman (Chicago, £19.50)

The sub-subtitle is "An American Alchemist in the Scientific Revolution", and this fascinating work aims to show again that the imagined prizes of alchemy motivated the birth of modern science (understood here as beginning in the 17th century). Starkey was America's first famous scientist, and combined roles as an alchemist, a doctor, an economist, and a philosopher. Newman illuminates the colourful arcana of alchemical pamphlets with their "riddling image-language" and explores the concrete influence that his biographical subject had on Isaac Newton himself, through the fictional intermediary known as Eirenaeus Philatheles, a supposed alchemical adept whose confessions, Newman proves, were penned by Starkey. All this is great cabbalistic fun, but the serious point is that alchemy birthed the modern empirical method, and "had been the home of a corpuscular theory of matter since the Middle Ages". SP

In Search of Zarathustraby Paul Kriwaczek (Phoenix, £8.99)

It may be a source of disappointment to admirers of Nietzsche that his most famous work is the uncharacteristically windy cod-heroic poetasting of Thus Spake Zarathustra, but to Kriwaczek it was this work, by way of Richard Strauss's superior musical version, that inspired him to undertake an investigation into what the subtitle trumpets as "The First Prophet and the Ideas that Changed the World". As this book tells it, the Persian visionary Zarathustra, founder of what became the Zoroastrian sect, was the first man to proselytise a monotheistic religion, a fundamental battle between good and evil, and a coming Armageddon. Kriwaczek combines research into the history of religions with local colour provided by a whistlestop tour of Iran. He is an engaging and intelligent writer, although you may argue with his mimsy conclusions, such as that Zoroastrianism has "become an integral part of a universal spiritual world-view": no such thing exists. SP

Blood and Champagne: The Life and Times of Robert Capaby Alex Kershaw (Pan, £8.99)

Born in Budapest as André Friedmann, the photographer who reinvented himself as Robert Capa lived a life that reads like a lad-mag editor's fantasy. He produced the most powerful pictures of the Spanish civil war and the D-Day landings, besides covering Israel's birth, Trotsky's death and France's defeat in Vietnam (where he was killed in 1954); he bedded movie stars and models when not on assignment or playing poker with Steinbeck and Hemingway; and showed himself to be more than a selfish image-grabber by setting up the Magnum agency. Kershaw combines enjoyable glimpses of this swaggering lifestyle with cool analysis of Capa's methods, offering a judicious assessment of his controversial shot of a Spanish republican soldier's death. His biography's only flaw is one he notes himself with understandable exasperation - as it's unauthorised, the estate vetoed the use of any photos by its subject. JD

The World We're Inby Will Hutton (Abacus, £9.99)

Published a year before the Tories were at last kicked out, The State We're In compellingly portrayed the UK as a nation in crisis. Seven years on, Hutton delivers an equally damning assessment of the US, focusing on the ruinous consequences of its unrestrained capitalism. Rather than remaining bewitched by the policies of the American right, he argues, Britain should more fully adopt a European model based on distinctive ideas of property, welfare provision and the public realm. Less fortunate in its timing than the author's debut, this plea for closer ties with our continental partners necessarily plays down Germany's current economic woes and the recent election of rightwing sleazeballs to run France and Italy. But the second book is more exhilaratingly wide-ranging than the first, and will find its true moment once battle is finally joined over the euro - when its masterly brief history of the EU should become essential reading. JD